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Algeria: Attacks on women in Hassi Messaoud

In July 2001, working women in the Saharan city Hassi Messaoud were attacked by a mob of three-hundred men following a sermon given in the local mosque by islamist imam Amar Taleb.

"Ordinary Fascism, Fundamentalism and Femicide," an article by Mahl.

What started in Hassi Messaoud, Algeria on the night of July 13-14,
2001 is NOT one more crime/violence/violation in the wartime situation that our
country has now become famous for. A qualitative change has taken place. For the
first time one has witnessed crimes committed not by the organised troops of
fundamentalist armed groups (GIA*, AIS* and the like), but a pogrom conducted by
ordinary citizens brainwashed by the incendiary speeches/preaches of a FIS*
inspired Imam against another category of ordinary citizens.

In other
words we moved from violations committed by a fascist party, to mobbing by
people inspired by the same ideology. This damage, self inflicted by the people
of Algeria on the people of Algeria, will now take generations to heal and has
laid the couch for the coming back of the Islamists on the political
scene.

THE
FACTS

According to early reports from the independent
Algerian press, during the night of Friday July 13 to Saturday July 14, after
the sermon of the Friday 13th prayers at the mosque by an Islamist imam, Amar
Taleb, in the Saharan city of Hassi Messaoud, the most ancient oil station in
the country, a mob of 300 men attacked working women in the city area called
Bouamama. These were mostly cleaning personnel and a few secretaries and
cooks[1]
, all employed by foreign oil companies. The women had been
imported from North-Western cities of Algeria, poverty being the reason for this
emigration from within: their meagre salaries helped feed a whole extended
family, not only the children of these widows and divorcees - but also parents,
brothers, sisters, cousins, etc…[2]
Witnesses said that the Imam accused these women of 'immoral'
behaviour and called on the men in the mosque to a 'jihad against the Evil' and
to 'chase the women fornicators out of the area'[3]
, on the ground that since they were living on their own by
themselves, that is without a 'wali', meaning the male guardian of the Maliki
tradition, - hence they could be considered to be prostitutes.

In this
process of purification of the area, women were murdered, tortured, stabbed,
mutilated and raped - including three young women who were virgins (indeed
'prostitutes'!) who claim they were gang raped.[4]
Their houses were robbed, looted and some were set on fire.
Security forces intervened at 3 am. The pogrom continued on July 14-15 in the
area of Hassi Messaoud called 'area 136', and went on July 16 in the area called
'area 200'. On July 17 and then on July 23-24 similar events took place in the
Southern city of Tebessa, where not only the houses of single women but also
shops owned by women, such as hair dressing salons, were also attacked. In Hassi
Messaoud, 95 women who have been attacked,[5]
plus some that 'could be attacked' have been locked up by the
authorities 'for their protection'[6]
in a youth hostel guarded by security forces. Till today, they are
not allowed to leave the place, not even to regain their hometowns. They are
sequestered without access to medicines and sufficient food.[7]
However, more and more women gather at the gates and plead in vain
with the armed guards to be admitted inside: but the hostel is filled to the
brim.[8]

Independent journalists report that the Imam and, depending on the
reports, between 9 and 40 of the identified perpetrators[9]
- that included some of the owners of the poor shacks rented out
for a very high price to the working women - may have been arrested by the
police and could be in the process of being tried.

BACKGROUND

The first reported case
of an organised, collective and religiously inspired attack on women took place
in Ouargla, another southern city of Algeria as early as June 1989, i.e. long
before the end of the electoral process that is often invoked as an explanation
of and, strangely enough somehow, as a justification for the crimes committed by
fundamentalist armed groups on ordinary people. The house of a divorcee, named
Ouarda, who was living by herself with her numerous children, was burnt to ashes
by a mob. In the process, the youngest of her children, a handicapped child aged
4 who could not escape the flames in the night, was burnt to death. The police
did not intervene.

The Algerian feminist Khaleda Messaoudi gave a
detailed account of this case to an international audience on the occasion of
the UN World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993 - at a time when
it was crystal clear that the war against women was part and parcel of the FIS
program of sexual apartheid in Algeria. This first reported case was followed by
similar individual attacks in other cities.[10]

However, it is in the early 70's that women employed in state owned
factories in Sidi Bel Abbès (north-west of Algiers) were stoned by men on their
way to the plant and prevented access to their work place. At first the police
had to close down the factories. They later reopened but for several weeks women
workers had to be protected by the authorities on the way to
work.

Throughout the nineties, AIS and GIA killers attacked thousands of
women at random: the list of murdered women established by the Observatory of
Human Rights in Algiers is eloquent: it ranges from veiled to unveiled women,
working women to housewives... with a special mention for women who earned their
living by 'beautifying' women (hairdressers, aestheticians, etc...)

The
Algerian feminist Zazi Sadou gave testimony on these cases to the international
audience of the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1996.

In Hassi
Messaoud, the assailants went to war against women shouting 'Allah Houwa Akbar'
(God is the highest); they were also shouting slogans against the state ('down
with the hogra' - 'hogra' being the term the Algerians have been
using for decades to stigmatise the contempt and arrogance of governments vis a
vis the people); they were also shouting against the women 'foreigners' who came
to 'steal the jobs' of the local population.[11]

All the ingredients of fascism are there: from the blessing of God
and religion ('Gott mit uns' i.e. 'God is with us' was engraved on the
buckle of the SS belts), to the identification and demonisation of a 'subhuman'
category of citizens that can and should be physically eliminated (the
'untermensch') and to the scapegoat 'foreigner' who is held responsible
for social disarray.

It is NOT the first time in recent
history that the extreme right political groups and parties make use of people's
discontent. Fascism has always built on the legitimate protest of the
dispossessed classes, backed by middle class who fear that their share of the
cake is not big enough or could be threatened. Fascism manipulates and subverts
it and finally points at a scapegoat fragment of the population as THE cause of
social disarray. There is no doubt that the successive governments of Algeria
have progressively given up on the promises of independence to the people. The
gap between rich and poor grows wider and wider.[12]
The mass of very young lumpen proletariat[13]
grows more hostile to the privileges of the New Class that not
only ruled the country for its benefits for decades but also now openly loots
it.

Social protest has been hijacked by the FIS party since the 70s, -
long before the halting of the electoral process that could have taken them to
power legally in 1991. FIS was the only political force that successfully
organized underground starting from independence in 1962. It is the party that
manipulated the first public demonstrations and riots against the state in 1989
and long preceded the democratic parties that sprung up after the political and
economic 'liberalisation' of 1990, which led to the present enormous gap between
rich and poor.

Recent protests, marches, demonstrations and riots that
were initiated in the Berber areas and are now springing up all over the
country, have attempted - not with full success - to articulate
and relocate political
protest in the class struggle context where it belongs, rather than in the
religious terrain or the 'cultural’ one.

In wake of this danger of a real political awakening and popular
organising, the fundamentalist parties are launching an all out new offensive -
the incendiary preaching of the Imam of Hassi Messaoud being only a small part
of it. To it, we must add the raging rise of killings and violence against the
civilian population (several hundred deaths a month for the past one year), the
arrogance of the so-called 'repented' (i.e. ALL the former terrorists from AIS
and GIA who were pardoned unilaterally by the President Bouteflika and came back
from their “guerrilla personas” without surrendering their arms, to their
villages and cities where they, again, threaten people who do not abide by their
rules (no music, dress code, etc.) and women in particular.[14]

But their main offensive is on the diplomatic front: more and more
people in Algeria are extremely worried at the prospect of an alliance of
Bouteflika with any one of the fundamentalist parties, and even by a total legal
rehabilitation of FIS - an alliance that has been indicated by Bouteflika's
speeches and attitudes in an increasingly clear manner in the past few months,
after he pardoned the terrorists without investigation or judgement and declared
the 'civil concordia'. The President has even warned women that they should not
'provoke the Islamists' by their behaviour.[15]
This 'plot' is presently denounced all over the independent press
in Algeria.[16]

The overwhelming silence of the international media on the pogrom
in Hassi Messaoud and other cities speaks for itself: these events simply do not
fit into the simplistic representation that they have given of the Algerian
situation, hence they do not exist and cannot be reported. Until the early 90’s
the international media reported widely about the violations committed by the
state against the fascist fundamentalists. Not that they should not have
reported on these violations... But how come they did not report when the state
was torturing and slaughtering the communists, the democrats and the secularists
in the 60’s, the 70’s and the 80’s? How come they barely reported on the
violations and systematic crimes of the fascist fundamentalists starting from
the 70’s, then in the 80’s? How is it that, at the height of the killings, in
the 90’s, when intellectuals, artists, foreigners, secularists and ordinary
women were slaughtered and entire villages massacred, the media took little time
to launch a campaign «who kills who?» in order to inculcate doubts about the
actual responsibility of the Islamists in these crimes, - despite those being
announced by their own identifiable «communiqués», then implemented and
subsequently claimed by the armed groups?

This campaign aimed at charging
the Algerian state with the crimes committed by the Islamists and making the
latter appear as victims of the state, not as violators. Why? : The study
ordered by the Rand Corporation and written by Graham Fuller a few years ago,
crudely states that the USA needs above all to protect their interests in the
Algerian Oil, and that a FIS government will preserve those best. The failure to
recognize that Algeria is facing a life or death struggle for or against fascism
seems hard to believe, if one does not also remember that similar blindness was
prevailing when the mudjahidin – later the Taliban were gaining power in
Afghanistan. The same blindness and desire for conciliation unfortunately
applied to the rise of Hitler. The myth of « moderate Islamists » needing to be
given legal recognition in order to bring peace in Algeria cannot survive the
ordinary fascism of the pogroms in Hassi Messaoud. We are still to hear any
official protest from the fundamentalist parties and their clear statement on
the rights of women to earn a livelihood for themselves and their families
wherever they find a job in their own country, as well as their right to live
without a male guardian.

It is the responsibility of the fascist Islamist
project on the Algerian society when brain washed mobs believe that they have
the right and duty to be the judges and executioners of working women. Their
'opinion' on the place and role of women in society is in total opposition to
international law and humanitarian law, and thus cannot be protected as 'freedom
of speech'. It is the 'freedom of speech' of the Imam of Hassi Messaoud that
immediately provoked the pogrom.

We call on the anti fascists forces in
the world to oppose the fascist project in Algeria. We call on them to make a
clear cut difference between, on the one hand, the need to protect human rights
of all citizens -including the human rights of the fascists and of their victims
as well - and the clear and final opposition with which their project of society
and their political program needs to be met.

A group of concerned
Algerian democrats is presently planning to launch an International Tribunal on
Fascist Fundamentalism that will also point at the international linkages of
fundamentalist groups from one country to the other - and the implication of
European states and the USA in the backing of fundamentalist armed
groups.

[2]
Testimony of Fatima, quoted in L'Actualité en
Question, article by S.L.: She earned 11,000 dinars (US$146.00) per
month, for cleaning the apartments of the employees of the oil company she was
working for, out of which she spent 4,500dinars as her share of the rent of the
room she shared with her cousin’s sister who also worked for the same company.
She commented: 'How could I refuse (this work), I who have charge of 18 people
of my family, including five nephews who have been orphaned?'. 'They used to
come together, four or five women in order to rent one room from a family house,
or even a garage, for 9,000 to 10,000 per month'. Le Matin° 2856,
Tuesday July 17, 2001, p.2, Youssef Rezzoug

[4]
« Among the 20 wounded women I saw there were 17 girls » Le
Matin, idem «'Three of them are in intensive care at the city hospital.
Houria is 25 year old. During the night of Friday-Saturday, she was gang raped.
'They were about 60 men to attack me and my sister' she cries, 'I was a virgin
and I never ceased pleading and begging them and shouting: 'Don't! I am a
virgin!' . They penetrated me in all possible ways. One of the assailants pushed
his whole fist into my bleeding sexual organ' she cries ». « I have seen a woman
who has been sodomised with an iron bar, while the police, under order, did not
move' recounts Houria ». Le Matin, July 17

[5]
« Young women and old women, about one hundred of them, with about
20 children are spending the third night in a youth hostel where conditions of
living are appalling ». Le Matin, July 17

[6]
« Women who could be targeted at by the youth of these areas have
been placed in the youth hostel by the authorities ... 'in order to better
ensure their security' ». style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Le
Matin, idem

[7]
After visiting the victims Khaleda Messaoudi (elected
representative of government) stated that the women 'have no use of speeches,
they need medical and psychological care and to be rehabilitated through the
legal persecution of the tortionnaries' Le Matin n°2859, July
20-21, 2001

[8]
« The youth hostel is already full. The persons in charge of this
place have refused yesterday the right to enter it to several young women who
begged for it. ' The situation is getting worse in area 200, I want to come in'
shouted a woman to the person in charge of the youth hostel 'What can I do,' he
asked, 'we are not equipped'» La Tribune idem « They cannot bear
anymore 'this prison' the gates of which are locked and guarded by policemen »
'Le Matin, idem.

[9]La Tribune, July 17 mentions the arrest of the Imam
and of about 40 young men, and 4 to 6 deceased women. Le Matin
confirms only 9 arrests and El Watan slightly more. Later reports
mention that the Imam has not been arrested and that he denies having called for
the attack on the women. The authorities deny that there were women who died in
the attacks but witnesses testify that they saw several of them
dead.

[10]
«In the name of moral order which foments punitive expeditions,
acid throwing at women in student hostels, arson in Ouargla, Remchi and
elsewhere, assassinations, rapes, harassment of couples, the cowards always
target women - women who are only guilty of being visible and dignified ».
Statement of women's organisation RAFD ( Algerian Assembly of Democratic Women),
after the pogrom in Hassi Messaoud, published in Le Matin n°2857,
July 18, 2001.

'The Coming Back of Inquisition': 'These two horrible nights unfortunately come to
remind us of punitive expeditions organised by fundamentalist commandos who
targeted women from 1989 to 1991 throughout the national territory, and far
before this phenomenon extended to the whole society and was labelled terrorism.
Thus from 1989 to 1991 all over, in Ouargla, M'sila, Bou Saada, Jijel, Annaba,
Mostaganem, Mascara, Blida, Algiers, etc... widowed and divorced women as well
as female students in student hostels were submitted to moral and physical
violence aimed at, according to these inquisitors, 'purifying society' by the
fire and by the blood. What followed demonstrated that, by attacking the
feeblest part of society and submitting it to fear, it is the whole of Algeria
that they are trying to condition by terror. For a society that is conditioned
by terror is a paralysed society to which the most totalitarian project can be
imposed'. Statement by women's organisation RACHDA: Le Matin July
17

The organisations that protested within Algeria included: the National
Association SOS Distressed Women that declared that it would file a court case
on behalf of the victims in Hassi Messaoud; the National Committee against
Forgetting and Treason, CNOT, that protested against the unilateral pardon of
terrorists by President Bouteflika, and the International Federation of
Associations of Victims of Terrorism – Algerian Section. Le Matin
July 18

On the 18th of July, three women deputies including the well-known
feminist Khaleda Messaoudi, went to visit the women who had been attacked in
Hassi Messaoud. Le Matin n°2859, July 20-21,
2001

[11]
« A youth states that he does not regret anything of what happened
to the women for they are the ones who 'robbed the sons of the city (ouled el
bled) of their daily bread (gagne-pain)' ».

[12]
The population growth is still 2.28%. 32% of the population is
illiterate

[14]
Over the past two years, since the 'repented' or 'pardoned'
Islamists returned home, numerous reports came out in the independent Algerian
press regarding shopkeepers harassed, threatened and scared for having had a
radio playing in their shop; young women being publicly threatened for being
outside their homes without a male guardian. 'Repented' Islamist armed groups
are making clear allusions to the fact that fundamentalists will come back to
power and that they will punish all those who fail to abide by their rules
now.

[15]
Over the past month, President Bouteflika alluded in several of his
public speeches to the fact that women should dress in a way that would not
'provoke the Islamists', should not smoke in public,
etc.

[16]
alliance between President Bouteflika and the FIS, see the titles of Le Matin
n°2858, Thursday July 19, 2001 on p 1: 'THEY are back!: the islamist leaders
reinvest the scene', 'The islamist army of Bouteflika'; And on p 2 and 3: 'The
islamists gain ground', Bouteflika or the rise of FIS', 'They have shared the
terrain'. In Le Matin n°2851, July 11, 2001 Front page:' Who wants the coming
back of FIS?' In Le Matin n°2852, July 12, 2001, Front page: 'Bouteflika-FIS:
the plot is getting more precise', and a full page on p 5 ' The Fis of the
government and the other FIS ( The ex-FIS officially banned, is being
rehabilitated subrepticely without any reaction from the institutions of the
state and without the public opinion being informed)'.